As a founder member of Mystery Women in 1997, promoting Crime Fiction has always been my passion.
Following the closure of Mystery Women, a new group was formed on 30th January 2012 promoting crime fiction.
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Sunday, 4 December 2016

‘A Chaser on the Rocks’ by Simon Maltman

Published by Solstice Publishing, 13 September 2016. ISBN: 978-1625264348(PB)

Brian Caskey was a policeman in the Royal Ulster
Constabulary (now the Northern Ireland Police Force) in Belfast at the height
of the Troubles. Now, after being invalided out with mental stress, he is
trying to earn a living as a private investigator. Meanwhile, still under
therapy and also on various medications for his mental troubles, his therapist
has suggested that he take up creative writing. It has helped others, and might
do the same for him. So Caskey starts on a novel about Billy Chapman, a former
policeman turned private eye, but set in 1941 in Belfast during World War II at
a time when Belfast was being deliberately targeted by German bombers (and some
bombs also fell on the Irish Republic’s capital Dublin but the Germans, fearful
lest the United States be brought into the war, denied that they were
deliberate).

In
this book the two first person narratives, that of Caskey and that of Chapman,
are set side by side with alternate chapters in either voice. It starts with
Chapman who has come to the Causeway Hotel overlooking the famous Giants’
Causeway in Antrim, Northern Ireland, because he has been asked by the manager,
a Mr Loach, to look into the death a few days earlier of Frank McKenzie, a
walking tour guide employed by the hotel. McKenzie had fallen from the rocks of
the Causeway which the police had dismissed as an accident but Loach suspects
that it was no accident.

Caskey cannot work full time on his novel because his own PI work, spasmodic
though it be, also makes demands. He has to investigate the theft of liquor
from a Belfast pub but when he finds one of the thieves he is dead. There is a
link between the dead thief and a local called Sean’s Trust also supported by a
local group of enthusiastic young Christians which Caskey investigates. Despite
the calls on his time by his PI work he is progressing with his novel and
interacting with the others in his writing group and his novel is comparatively
well organised. But Caskey’s own behaviour is becoming disorganised and fuelled
by growing anger at almost everyone whom he encounters. Just how truthful is
Caskey’s narrative about himself? Does he really know who he is? Has his
illness made him the classic unreliable narrator of post-modernist literature?

In
this book which is his first full-length novel the author has set himself a
difficult task. One thing he has done well is the contrasting narrative voices,
that of Chapman with his classic Chandler-inspired laconic wisecracks in
italics, and that of Caskey with his disintegrating personality expressing
itself with typically modern incoherence in ordinary type. There are some problems
with the sub-editing, that do pull one out of the story, and although relatively
minor can be distracting to the reader, but overall an interesting first book.

------

Reviewer: Radmila
May

Simon Maltmanis a writer and
musician from Bangor, County Down. A
Chaser on the Rocks is his first full-length novel.

Radmila Maywas
born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven
years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice.
Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional
work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of
her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published
late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal
flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a
third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology –
and is now concentrating on her own writing.

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About Me

From an early age I have been a lover of crime fiction. Discovering like minded people at my first crime conference at St Hilda’s Oxford in 1997, I was delighted when asked to join a new group for the promotion of female crime writers. In 1998 I took over the running of the group, which I did for the next thirteen years.
During that time I organised countless events promoting crime writers and in particular new writers. But apart from the sheer joy of reading, ‘I actually love books, not just the writing, the plot or the characters, but the sheer joy of holding a book has never abated for me. The greatest gift of my life has been the ability to read'.